


A Bird In the Hand

by carolinecrane



Category: Orange is the New Black
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 16:34:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carolinecrane/pseuds/carolinecrane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Lorna has the flu, and Nicky definitely doesn't steal any of her stuff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Bird In the Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Extra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Extra/gifts).



It starts with a lipstick. 

It’s been a while now since Lorna called things off between them, and that’s fine, Nicky can handle it. It’s not like she’s never had a dry spell before.

But they still have to live together, and nothing’s going to change the fact that they belong to the same tribe, so Nicky figures they might as well stay friendly. That’s the only reason she still hangs around Lorna’s bunk, listening to her rattle on about Christopher this and Christopher that, idly messing with Lorna’s things without really paying attention to what she’s doing.

That’s how the lipstick ends up in her pocket. Nicky doesn’t steal it on purpose or anything, because what’s she going to do with a lipstick anyway? But it ends up in her pocket all the same, and the next day when Lorna spends all of breakfast going on and on about what happened to her lipstick, Nicky just nods and doesn’t say anything.

She doesn’t mention the lipstick tucked safely at the back of her cubby in her own bunk, not because she has any use for it, but because if she admits she has it, she’s going to have to come up with a reason _why_.

And there’s no reason. What reason could there be? After all, it’s just a lipstick.

She’s not even sure how she ended up with one of Lorna’s socks. A mix-up in the laundry, probably, or maybe it got stuck to her clothes when she was sitting on Lorna’s bunk watching her search through her cubby for her missing lipstick. She means to give it back -- the sock, not the lipstick -- but she sets it aside and somehow it ends up mixed in with her own things and after a while it seems like there’s no point.

It’s just a sock, right? Nobody’s going to miss a sock.

“Laundry lost one of my socks, can you believe it?” Lorna says at breakfast a week later. “Now I have to buy another pair from commissary. I was gonna use that money to buy a new lipstick.”

“Just go talk to Vause,” Nicky says, shrugging like she doesn’t really care one way or the other. And yeah, she could just tell Lorna that she knows where her stupid sock is, but she still doesn’t have a clue how to explain it. “They’ve gotta have a whole pile of socks down there just waiting to be claimed, right?”

Lorna shakes her head, then she glances toward the guard on duty before she turns back to Nicky. “I don’t want to make a fuss. The way everybody’s been walking around on eggshells since...you know.” She shrugs, and Nicky doesn’t need her to mention Chapman’s name to know what she means. “They’d probably do a whole inquiry over a sock.”

When she grins, Nicky laughs along with her, and she doesn’t feel guilty about the sock. She doesn’t, because it’s just a sock, for fuck’s sake. She can give it back any time, no big deal. But she doesn’t give it back, and when she steals a postcard one of Lorna’s cousins sent her from Cancun, she knows she’s got a problem.

It’s not a big deal. It’s not: a lipstick, a postcard, and a fucking sock. Nothing anybody would miss, really. Except none of them have all that much to begin with, so when Lorna notices the missing postcard and gets more weepy than mad, Nicky does start to feel a little guilty.

Lorna’s on her knees when Nicky walks into her bunk, peering under the bed like she’s looking for something, and Nicky’s pretty sure she knows what it is. 

“You should be careful where you point that thing, you know,” Nicky says anyway, smirking in the direction of Lorna’s ass when Lorna looks over her shoulder.

“My postcard’s gone,” Lorna says, like she didn’t even hear Nicky. “The one my cousin sent from her honeymoon.”

Nicky scans the wall above Lorna’s bed, taking in all the postcards and pictures she’s got taped up there. There are so many of them Nicky really didn’t think she’d notice one stupid picture of the beach. She gets mail all the time from her family, so what’s one postcard? When she looks back at Lorna she sees the way Lorna’s eyes are glittering, like maybe she’s about to cry. Over a fucking _postcard_ , like that makes any sense. 

“Relax, it probably just fell down and got stuck under something,” Nicky lies. “Do you want me to help you look?”

“It’s no use, I looked everywhere,” Lorna says, and now she’s sniffling. “It’s not here. Somebody must’ve took it.”

“What would somebody want with your postcard?” Nicky says before she can stop herself, but Lorna just sniffs again and sits down on the edge of her bed, one hand on her forehead. 

“I don’t know, maybe they liked the picture.”

“Yeah, maybe. Listen, kid, you feeling okay?” Nicky asks, watching Lorna hold her head like she’s trying to stop it from moving. 

“I’m fine,” Lorna mumbles into her hands. “I just...I think I’ll lie down for a little while.”

Nicky resists the urge to reach out and push Lorna’s hair back from her face, because they’re not that kind of friends anymore. But they’re still friends, and Nicky still hates seeing Lorna looking so...small. 

“Good idea,” she says as she watches Lorna curl up in a ball on her mattress. “I’ll see you later, huh?”

Lorna makes a little sniffling noise but doesn’t open her eyes, which Nicky figures is the end of the conversation. And she learned a long time ago how to take a hint, so she heads back to her own bunk and tries not to spend the rest of the night thinking about how miserable Lorna looked when she left her.

~

Nicky spends the next day with a postcard stuck inside of her waistband. She still hasn’t worked out a plan to get it back in Lorna’s bunk without being spotted, but she figures if she keeps it on her, the opportunity will present itself eventually.

And yeah, okay, maybe she feels a little guilty. Mostly she just feels kind of stupid, though, because she still doesn’t know why she took it, and now Lorna’s having some kind of nervous breakdown.

When Lorna doesn’t show up for breakfast, Nicky starts to worry a little more. She doesn’t show up for lunch, either, which is definitely a bad sign, but by dinner half the inmates are down with some kind of flu, and it dawns on Nicky that the reason Lorna was acting so strange yesterday is because she’s sick.

It makes her feel better, which is kind of weird, but hey, she never said she was a saint, and she’d rather Lorna have the flu like everybody else than have a nervous breakdown on account of Nicky’s sticky fingers. 

After dinner Nicky finds Lorna in her bunk, blanket pulled up to her chin and looking miserable. She squints up at Nicky and lets out a pathetic cough, and Nicky’s grateful all over again for her cough syrup cocktail. “How you feeling, kid?”

The only answer she gets is a quiet groan, then Lorna closes her eyes again. “That good, huh?”

Nicky sits down on the edge of Lorna’s bunk, reaching out to press the back of her hand against a hot, clammy forehead. She’s no doctor, but even she can tell that Lorna’s got a temperature. Her skin feels like it’s going to burst into flames any second, but she’s shivering under her blanket like she’s freezing to death.

“You eaten anything today?” Nicky asks.

Lorna jerks her head feebly in a way that Nicky’s pretty sure means ‘no’, then she coughs again. “Doesn’t matter,” she croaks, and Nicky can tell by the sound of her voice that she hasn’t said anything for a while. “Can’t get it here anyway.”

“Can’t get what?” Nicky says, frowning now because she’s pretty sure hallucinating is a bad sign.

“My mom used to make this chicken soup,” Lorna murmurs, eyes kind of glazed over like she’s somewhere far away, where there’s no razor wire or bars and maybe the air smells like somebody’s home cooking. “It always made me feel...better...when...”

She trails off, but Nicky gets the gist all the same. She knows what she needs to, anyway: Lorna feels lousy, and what would make her feel better is some of her mom’s chicken soup. Not that Nicky can just run over to the Morello house for takeout, but she kind of owes it to Lorna to do the next best thing.

When she’s sure Lorna’s asleep she reaches out to touch her forehead again, brushing back a couple of damp hairs before she stands up. Not for the first time she wishes Red was still in charge of the kitchen, because there’s no way Mendoza’s going to do her any favors. Still, it probably can’t hurt to ask, and if she’s lucky, Mendoza will be willing to barter.

Nicky finds Mendoza still in the kitchens supervising cleanup, and sure enough, as soon as Nicky walks in, Mendoza narrows her eyes like she knows Nicky’s up to something. Which isn’t even true, technically. Nicky pastes on her friendliest smile anyway, but that just makes Mendoza squint at her even harder.

“Kitchen’s closed.”

“What, a girl can’t stop by to say thanks for the great dinner?” Nicky asks, grinning a little broader now. 

Mendoza’s not buying it, of course, but it’s not like Nicky expects her to. She just wants Mendoza to know that she comes in peace, that she’s not on some spy mission for Red.

“What do you want?” Mendoza asks, arms folded across her chest now, so Nicky figures it’s time to get down to business.

“I was just wondering if you had some chicken soup. Morello’s got that thing that’s going around and she hasn’t eaten anything all day. It’d make her feel a lot better.”

“Soup’s not on the menu this week.”

“Yeah, but don’t you have a can or something stashed somewhere?”

“What, I’m gonna open a whole can of soup just because you’re trying to get back in Morello’s pants? You white girls, you can’t go without for more than a couple days, I swear.”

“It’s not like that. I mean, yeah, okay, it is,” she admits when Mendoza raises an eyebrow at her. “But not this time. Look, I owe her, okay? I’m just looking for some soup here.”

For a minute Mendoza just stares at her, but finally she lets out a sigh and says, “I got some frozen cubed chicken left over from pot pie night. That’s the best I can do.”

“I’ll take it,” Nicky says, biting back the urge to make a joke about frozen meat. She doesn’t mention Red’s opinions on frozen foods, either; instead she just shuts up and waits while Mendoza roots around in the freezer.

“Don’t see what good this will do you,” Mendoza says, handing over a small baggie of something that might have been a chicken once.

“Better than nothing, right?” Nicky answers, grinning as her hand closes around the bag. “Thanks, Mendoza. I owe you.”

“Bet your ass you do,” Mendoza calls after her. Nicky knows that’s a favor Mendoza will be calling in eventually, but it’ll be worth it if she can pull this off.

She stashes the chicken in the ice machine, glancing over her shoulder to make sure nobody spots her before she buries it carefully in the front corner. The last thing she needs is for somebody to see her storing food in the ice and freak out, especially when she only needs to keep it cold long enough to find the rest of what she needs.

Her next stop is her own bunk, where she roots around on her shelf for every piece of candy she has, plus a couple smokes she has stashed for emergencies. At the last minute she pockets Lorna’s lipstick, too, then she heads back down to the rec room.

Boo’s sitting at a table with Yoga Jones and the Sister, grinning at something one of them said. Nicky crosses the room and drops into the chair next to Boo. “Hey. You got any Cup-A-Soup?”

“What do you want Cup-A-Soup for?” Boo asks, but she’s already eyeing the Twix in Nicky’s hand.

“I’ve got a craving,” she says. “Do you want to trade or what?”

“Yeah, okay, keep your panties on,” Boo says, but she stands up and waves goodbye to the others before she leads Nicky back to her bunk. 

“How’s your girl?” Boo asks as she hands over a packet of chicken noodle.

“Not so hot,” Nicky answers, handing over the candy. “And she’s not my girl.”

Boo smiles a little too knowingly, but Nicky ignores it and stashes the soup in her waistband. “You don’t have any pepper, do you?”

“What are you doing, starting a cooking school?” Boo asks, but she digs around on her shelf until she finds one of those little paper packets of pepper.

“Thanks,” Nicky says, pocketing the pepper without answering Boo’s question. The truth is she’s not really sure what she’s doing or even why she’s doing it, but she’s gotten this far, so she figures she might as well see it through.

She finds Red in her bunk, and it’s still kind of weird to see her alone after watching Norma follow her around for so long. Red’s stretched out on her bed, glasses perched on the edge of her nose and reading a book, but somehow she doesn’t look as regal as she used to. Nicky knows why -- everybody knows why -- but somehow Nicky still keeps expecting to find her holding court like she used to in the old days.

“Hey, Red, you mind if I use your hot pot?”

Red gestures toward the cabinet where her hot pot sits without looking up, and Nicky sets down the soup and the pepper and picks it up. She heads to the bathroom to fill it with water, then she stops by the ice machine to retrieve her chicken. When she gets back to Red’s bunk she’s still reading her book, but before Nicky’s done mixing in the ingredients, Red marks her place and sets the book down.

“What are you doing?”

“Making soup, what’s it look like?”

“ _Why_ are you making soup?”

Nicky sighs and stirs the pale soup with the frozen chicken floating in it a few more times before she glances over her shoulder at Red. “Morello’s got that flu that’s going around. She said she wanted chicken soup.”

“That’s not chicken soup,” Red says, standing up now to peer over Nicky’s shoulder. Her nose is wrinkled in vague disgust, and Nicky can’t exactly blame her.

“Hey, it’s got real chicken,” she says anyway, because it might be pretty pathetic, but at least she’s making an effort.

“You need carrots. And celery, if you can find any. Peppers and an onion. You got anything to trade?” Nicky nods, and Red pulls the spoon out of her hand and shoves her out of the way. “Go see if any of the Latina girls will make a trade. And find somebody with some ramen, if you can.”

“There’s noodles in there already,” Nicky says, gesturing toward the hot pot where some of the sad little Cup-A-Soup noodles are floating.

“Bah, noodles. These aren’t _noodles_ ,” Red says in that tone that tells Nicky she’s just insulted Red’s cooking somehow. She doesn’t ask what they are, exactly, because she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to hear the answer.

“Okay, okay,” Nicky says before Red changes her mind about helping and kicks Nicky out of her bunk, or worse, spits in the soup just to prove her point. “Ramen it is.”

Nicky leaves Red to mutter over the broth and heads back out of the suburbs, past the ghetto in search of some of the older Latina ladies who usually have a decent stash of fresh produce. Technically it’s the wrong time of day for trading, so she knows the pickings are bound to be slim, but if she’s lucky some of them will have raided the salad bar at dinner and be willing to part with whatever they smuggled out.

She trades the rest of her candy for two red peppers and half an onion. The peppers have seen better days, but Nicky figures it won’t matter once they’re chopped up in the soup. None of the Latina girls have carrots or celery, though, so she heads over to the ghetto to see if anybody there can help her. Sophia’s her first stop, mainly because she trades for haircare all the time, and if anybody’s got what Nicky’s looking for, chances are Sophia will know about it.

“Hey,” Nicky says when she reaches Sophia’s bunk, standing just outside the entrance. “”You wouldn’t happen to have any vegetables you want to trade for, would you?”

“What do you want vegetables for?” Sophia asks, eyebrows raised and her lips upturned in an amused smirk.

“Not whatever you’re thinking,” Nicky says, but she grins back at Sophia all the same. “I’m making soup for Morello.”

“I always heard that the stomach was the way to a _man’s_ heart,” Sophia says.

“That’s not what I heard.” Nicky’s smile gets a little bigger when Sophia lets out a snort of barely suppressed laughter. “I need carrots and celery. Can you hook me up?”

“Depends. What are you trading?”

Nicky reaches into her pocket, hesitating for a second before she pulls out Lorna’s lipstick and holds it out for Sophia to inspect. She doesn’t miss the way Sophia’s eyebrows rise again, but she holds her ground as Sophia pulls the top off the lipstick and then puts it back on again.

“This isn’t exactly your color.”

“Could be yours,” Nicky says, flashing a hopeful smile when Sophia just looks at her. “Come on, don’t bust my balls here. Can you help me out or not?”

Sophia considers the lipstick for a few more moments before she hands it back. “Let me see what I can do.”

She doesn’t say whether or not Nicky’s supposed to wait around, but she doesn’t exactly have time to come back later, so Nicky stays put and watches as Sophia heads down the center of the block to another bunk. She stops and talks to a couple older ladies Nicky doesn’t know, laughing and then reaching out to touch the shorter one’s hair like she’s making styling suggestions or something.

And Nicky doesn’t really have time to stand around waiting for Sophia to socialize, not when her only packet of Cup-A-Soup and her chicken are already warming up in Red’s hot pot. But she waits anyway, and a couple minutes later Sophia comes back. She’s holding a napkin and a bottle of something, and Nicky frowns as she watches Sophia unwrap the napkin to reveal five aging baby carrots.

“I had to trade her a full highlight for this,” Sophia says. “She didn’t have celery, but she gave me this. It’s the best I can do.”

Sophia holds up the bottle and Nicky sees that it’s labeled ‘celery salt’. She doesn’t ask how an inmate has celery salt in her bunk, or why, of all the spices she could smuggle in, she’d pick that one. She doesn’t even know if it’ll work or if Red will send her right back out again, but she takes the bottle and the carrots and slips the lipstick into Sophia’s open palm.

“Thanks, Sophia. You’re a lifesaver.”

“You’re welcome. I hope your girl feels better soon.”

Nicky doesn’t bother correcting her this time. Instead she turns back toward her own block, juggling all her ingredients carefully to make sure she doesn’t lose anything. All she’s got left to trade with are cigarettes, and there aren’t a lot of people she knows who’ll trade a whole package of ramen for a couple stale smokes.

It’s the first time she’s really missed Chapman since she got herself thrown in the SHU, mostly because Nicky knows if she asked Chapman for ramen she’d hand it over without even asking for anything in return. If she had any, that is, and Chapman isn’t really the ramen type. Vause might be, though, and before she can talk herself out of it, Nicky’s heading for Vause’s bunk.

When she gets there Alex is stretched out on her bunk reading a book, pretty much the way Nicky found Red. When Nicky walks in Alex looks up, though, then she reaches up to push her glasses up to the top of her head. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Nicky answers, edging a little further into the room. “How’ve you been?”

They haven’t talked much since the whole thing with Chapman. Alex hasn’t talked to anybody much, so Nicky hasn’t been taking it personally. Still, she’s a cool chick and they’ve always gotten along well, so Nicky sort of misses hanging out with her. 

Alex shrugs without answering, then she swings her legs over the edge of her bunk. “What’s up?”

And Nicky can take a hint -- most of the time, anyway -- so she gets right to the point. “You got any ramen? All I have to trade is a couple smokes, and I know you probably don’t want those, but you could maybe trade them for something you do want.”

For a minute Alex just looks at her, and Nicky fights the urge to grin and crack a dumb joke that will probably just make the tension even worse. “What’s with the ramen?”

“I’m...well, Red’s making soup. Morello’s got that thing that’s going around. I think she might be Patient Zero, actually.”

The ghost of a smile turns up the corners of Alex’s mouth, and Nicky wonders not for the first time how long it’s going to take her to snap out of it. Then again, she’s heard enough about how long it took Vause to get over Chapman the first time to figure it’s going to be a while. She stands up and crosses to her cubbie, rooting around for a few seconds before she turns back to Nicky and hands over a package of shrimp-flavored ramen. 

“Shrimp? Really?”

Vause shrugs again, but her smile’s a little more pronounced this time. “What can I say, I have lousy taste in junk food and women.”

Nicky grins back at her, and just for a second it feels like old times. “Here,” she says, holding out the cigarettes.

“Don’t worry about it,” Alex says, waving away Nicky’s hand.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. You can get me back some other time,” Alex answers.

“Thanks, Vause.”

“Don’t mention it. At least one of us should get the girl, right?”

Nicky opens her mouth to say that she’s pretty sure that’s not going to happen, but the truth is that they both know exactly why she’s spending her free time tracking down shriveled carrots and packages of noodles, so in the end she just shrugs. “I’ve always been an optimist.”

She grins again and turns away, hurrying back to Red’s bunk with her loot. When she gets there she dumps it all onto the top of Red’s cubbie, then she sits back and watches while Red cuts up vegetables and bitches about celery salt. By the time she’s done the whole block smells fantastic, and Nicky has no idea how she did it, but somehow Red’s managed to make something that looks an awful lot like homemade chicken soup.

“It’s the best I can do, under the circumstances,” Red says as she hands it over. “If I had my kitchen back...”

“This is amazing, Red, thanks,” Nicky answers, cutting her off before she can get started on Mendoza and the Latin Invasion, as she’s started calling it.

Red nods in a way that tells Nicky she approves of Nicky’s reaction, then she crosses back to her bunk and picks up her book. She settles back on the bed and opens to the place where she left off, and Nicky knows she’s dismissed. She’s almost out of the bunk, walking carefully so she won’t spill any soup, when she hears Red’s voice again.

“This isn’t magic soup, you know. She’s still going to be straight, no matter what you do.”

Nicky shrugs with one shoulder, then she grins at Red. “I thought you Russians were all about the magic.”

“Americans,” Red mutters under her breath, and Nicky laughs and walks as fast as she dares to Morello’s bunk.

When she gets there Morello’s eyes are closed, and Nicky sits down as gently as she can on the edge of her bunk. “Hey. You awake?”

Dark eyes open to peer up at her, then Morello blinks a couple times like she’s trying to get Nicky to come into focus. “What...”

“Brought you some soup.” Nicky turns until she’s facing Morello, taking hold of the spoon she borrowed from Red and holding it out along with the bowl.

“You...what?” Morello asks, but she sniffs the air a little and pushes herself up on her pillow, like maybe her stomach’s following the smell of the soup even though her brain hasn’t caught up yet.

“It’s not your mom’s, I know,” Nicky says as she watches Morello reach out and gingerly close a hand around the spoon. She takes the bowl and lets it rest on her chest just above her blanket, breathing in for a second or two before she takes her first taste. 

“Just remember I didn’t have a mother around to teach me how to cook,” Nicky says, suddenly nervous even though she’s technically not the one who did the cooking. It was her idea, though, and she figures that counts for something. “Though our housekeeper made a pretty slamming arroz con pollo.” 

Morello manages a weak smile, spoon dipping back into the bowl for another taste. She’s quiet for a while, and Nicky watches the noodles float around in the bowl and tries not to give into the urge to babble.

Finally Morello looks up at her, and Nicky doesn’t reach out to wipe a drop of broth from the center of her chin. “Considering what you had to work with, you didn’t do so bad.”

“Yeah?” Nicky says, and when Morello laughs softly, Nicky smiles.

“Yeah. Thanks for this. It was real sweet of you.”

“Just shut up and eat your soup,” Nicky answers. She waits until Morello turns her attention back to the soup, then she reaches behind her and carefully tugs the postcard out of the back of her waistband to slip it under the edge of Morello’s blanket where she’ll find it the next time she makes her bed.

It’s not going to change anything, she knows that. As soon as Morello gets to feeling better she’ll be back to talking about her fiance and planning a wedding that’s never going to happen, and Nicky will keep listening no matter how much it hurts, because that’s what people do when they care about someone. It’s not even close to what Nicky wants, but if it’s what Morello needs, then Nicky’s going to be the one to give it to her.


End file.
